Merle Haggard was an escape artist.
The future country music legend broke out of juvenile hall and prison 17 times by his own count as a teenager and young man. But his greatest escape was getting out of Oildale, the hardscrabble town in California where he grew up, the son of refugees from the Dust Bowl in Oklahoma.
“Oildale is and has been struggling with real poverty, abject poverty. I mean, a lot of the roads aren’t paved,” observes Ethan Hawke, director of the Merle Haggard documentary Highway 99: A Double Album, which just premiered at the Telluride Film Festival. “There’s a lot of homeless, a lot of addiction. And you start to see that this guy pulled himself out of there without any help. He’s incarcerated from 14 to 23, grew up with virtually no education. I’m not talking about a college education; I’m talking about no education and rises to the pinnacle of a profession and that kind of writer. It’s a staggering accomplishment.”
Two main factors motivated the Highway 99 project. One was Hawke’s conviction that Merle Haggard’s greatness and significance were being lost, obscured almost like the Oklahoma landscape in those dust storms of the 1930s.
“It did seem people had kind of forgotten about him,” Hawke notes. “’Mama Tried’ gets played by every cover band and stuff like that. And ‘Okie From Muskogee’ is the thing most people know about him. People forget that for a couple decades he was called the Poet of the Common Man, or the Voice of the Silent Majority, or all the different labels that got put on him.”
The filmmaker adds, “When he died, I know Willie Nelson sent out a group email to all his musician friends reminding people that one of the greatest songwriters who ever lived just passed and that he had more hits than Willie [Nelson], Johnny [Cash], and Dolly [Parton] combined. And just how rare it is that somebody could pick and sing and write like Merle Haggard could. Willie said, ‘Usually God is more democratic than that.’”
Another motivation behind the film — Hawke’s insight that Haggard speaks so clearly to the America of today, mired as it is in political polarization and antagonism. At one time or another, opposing camps tried to claim Haggard as their tribune.
“I felt a couple years ago with the election looming that no matter what happened in the election, half of America was going to be despondent with the outcome and that it might be a great time to visit Merle Haggard…He wasn’t left or right,” Hawke asserts. “He was really a humanist and talked about human feelings. And I think it kind of gives a meeting ground for people that I thought it could be a good moment to look at him no matter what happened.”
At one level Haggard never did escape Oildale, nor did he want to: he always closely identified with the working man and with those looked down upon by society. That spirit prompted him to write in defense of Okies in “Okie From Muskogee” – people disrespected by sophisticates. But Haggard also wrote “The Immigrant” in 1978, a song recognizing the work of Mexican laborers coming to this country undocumented. He sang, “Border patroller, don’t stop a stroller/’Cause the Mexican immigrant is helping America grow.”
In 1972, Haggard released “Irma Jackson,” a song that poignantly describes an interracial romance sabotaged by prejudice. As the film explores, he had written the song several years earlier, but Capitol Records wouldn’t release it because the label thought it would damage Haggard’s image. In 2003, Haggard spoke out against the invasion of Iraq and wrote the song “America First” in opposition to the war and to Pres. Bush W. Bush (ironically, Republican vice-presidential candidate J.D. Vance would use the tune as a campaign theme in 2024).
Perhaps most remarkably of all, Haggard endorsed Hillary Clinton’s bid for president in 2008 and wrote the song, “Let’s Put a Woman in Charge.”
“Around the same time, he also wrote a song — it’s not in the film – ‘Only Me and Crippled Soldiers Give a Damn’ about having respect for the flag. He didn’t like it when people disrespect the flag,” Hawke notes. “One [song] could be an obvious right-wing thing, but then the Hillary [song]… He’s just telling his truth… That thing Jason Isbell says [in the film] that I think is so great is you can’t hold up a mirror to one half of a person or a community. You have to actually look at what it is. And as soon as we start throwing people out, we’ve broken the mirror. We’re not looking at ourselves.”
Hawke organizes the film as a double album of Haggard songs, each one shedding light on the musician’s biography.
“He wrote so much, and he wrote so personally that I had a huge canvas. Basically, what I tried to do is figure out his life story and kind of make sense of the narrative and then use his own words to tell it,” he explains. “You want to talk about falling in love with Bonnie [Owens]? Okay, here’s a song. Want to talk about divorce? Oh, here it is, ‘I no longer wear the gold band on my finger.’ …’Things I learned in a hobo jungle,’ it’s telling us, ‘Okay, you didn’t go to school, your father died.’ …He gave me so much material.”
Highway 99, the stretch of road that gives the film its title, runs through California’s Central Valley – through Tulare, Visalia, Fresno, Merced, Turlock, Modesto, Stockton, Yuba City, Chico. And Oildale too. It goes up through Shasta County, where Merle Haggard died in 2016, on his birthday, at the age of 79. Highway 99 was the road at the beginnings of his life and at his end, the road that took him away and the road that brought him home.
The post Ethan Hawke On His Merle Haggard Documentary ‘Highway 99: A Double Album’: “He Gave Me So Much Material” – Telluride Film Festival appeared first on Deadline.
